A research team (a collaboration between archaeologists from the universities of Newcastle, Central Lancashire, Exeter, and York and geneticists from the universities of Harvard, Vienna, and the Basque Country) has examined the bones and teeth of 35 people in one of Britain’s best preserved Neolithic tombs near the village Hazleton in the Cotswolds. The study, published in the journal ‘Nature’ in December 2021, claimed to be the first of its kind to reveal in detail, how prehistoric families were structured.
The tomb is known as the Hazleton North long cairn. The study of this 5,700-year-old tomb has revealed many astounding facts about the world’s oldest family tree. It sheds extraordinary light on the importance of family and descent among people who were some of Britain’s first farmers.
Archaeologist Peter Bogucki has written in the Encyclopaedia of Archaeology that during the Neolithic period, prehistoric societies of Europe started to appear familiar to the modern observer and that during this time people ceased to be hunter-gatherers.
The prehistoric group of people lived around 3700-3600 BC. They were some of Britain’s first farmers. The tomb was constructed about 100 years after cattle and cereal cultivation had been introduced from continental Europe. It would be another 700 years before construction started on the most famous Neolithic legacy, Stonehenge (prehistoric stone circle monument, England).
The people of this period moved around the landscape and were probably herding animals as they did so. They consumed dairy products and had a protein-rich diet and they made pots for storing and cooking food.
The Neolithic tomb has two L-shaped chambers, one facing north and the other south. The DNA analysis of the remains of 35 individuals shows that 27 of them were close biological relatives. They belonged to five continuous generations of a single extended family. Most of those found in the tomb were descended from four women who all had children with the same man. Out of the four women, two women and all of their children up to the fifth generation were in the south chamber. The other two women and their kids were primarily in the north chamber. Some of them were switched to the south chamber later. This was probably due to the collapse of the north passage, which meant it was not possible to bury there anymore.
The DNA analysis revealed ages, genders, and family ties. It helped the scientists to make a detailed biographical picture of those individuals. It was also found that stepsons were adopted into the family (males whose mother was buried in the tomb and not their biological father). This suggests that the concept of ‘blended families’ is not a modern phenomenon.
Dr. Chris Flower, of the Newcastle University, UK, is the first author and lead archaeologist of this study. According to him, this discovery is of wider importance as it suggested that the architectural layout of the Neolithic tombs might tell us about how kinship operated at these tombs. However, the people who were buried in different parts of the tomb were based on the first-generation matriarch, they were descended from. It clearly shows that women held a socially significant place in the memories of this community.
The remaining eight individuals could not be determined to be close relatives. This reveals that biological relationship was perhaps not the only criterion for inclusion into the tomb.
There were two female family members who died during their childhood and were buried in the tomb. However, there was a complete absence of adult daughters, which suggests that their remains were placed either in the tombs of male partners, whom they had children with, or elsewhere. The absence of women is also a mystery. It is not clear whether they were cremated or disposed of in different ways in the landscape, or only people who achieved a certain social status were buried in a tomb.
The tomb has revealed the evidence of men having children with multiple women (polygamy). It also reveals that polyandry was also widespread, as women, too, had children with multiple men. The research proved that different women who had children with one man tended not to be related to one another. But in cases where women had children with more than one man, those men tended to be close relatives.
The inclusion of some very young children in the tomb shows that family occupied a very important place in this period.
The first co-author, Iñigo Olalde, from the University of the Basque Country, Spain, was the lead geneticist for the study. He stated that DNA preservation at the tomb was excellent. The use of the latest technologies in ancient DNA recovery and analysis allowed them to uncover the oldest family tree ever. They could also reconstruct it and analyse it to understand something profound about the social structure of these ancient groups.
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